Deployments and rollouts can be a real hassle for administrators and technical staff because they often involve going to every workstation to install the new software or to change the configuration on each computer. In this second of three articles focusing on the often-overlooked capabilities of Apple Remote Desktop, Ryan Faas shows you how you can leverage Remote Desktop to take some of the pain out of software rollouts and workstation deployments.

Deployments and rollouts can be sources of big headaches for administrators
and technical staff because they can involve going to every workstation, one by
one, to install the new software or to change the configuration on each
computer. Even if you are using a network-based deployment tool such as
NetInstall or Apple Software Restore (ASR), you still typically need to visit
each workstation at least once to initiate the install or restore process. Also
if you’re doing disk-image based deployment (such as NetInstall or ASR),
you need to build the image for each install and test it, hoping to ensure that
the install is complete and won’t need updating in the near future (which
would require another full-scale deployment or a rollout of updates).

So, how can Apple Remote Desktop help you avoid these headaches? By giving
you a wide range of features that allow you to perform the needed tasks
remotely. And not just by remote controlling each computer individually and
performing the steps on each one as though you had walked over to it. The
rollout and deployment tricks that Remote Desktop has up its sleeve can actually
be applied to a large number of computers simultaneously. These features include
the ability to set the startup disk of the computer(s), install software
packages, send sets of Unix commands, and copy files to selected computers.

Network Disk-Image Based Deployment—Started Remotely Over the
Network

One of the easiest ways for Mac administrators to deploy new workstations or
major overhauls to the configurations of existing workstations is by using
network and disk-image based deployment tools. The most prominent examples of
these tools are Apple’s NetInstall, which comes as part of Mac OS X
Server, and ASR, which comes with all versions of Mac OS X and can be used for
network and non-network variations.

Both tools allow the disk image that is used as the source for the
workstation to be stored on a file server. In the case of NetInstall, the
computer boots directly from the server, using Apple’s NetBoot technology
but launches into the Mac OS X installer application and overlays the
computer’s local hard drive with the disk image instead of loading the Mac
OS X environment. ASR can be initiated after booting the workstation from any
valid startup disk other than the one to be overlaid with the image (such as an
external hard drive or NetBoot set made available by Mac OS X Server). The
command-line ASR tool, or one of the GUI front ends for it, is then pointed to
the appropriate disk image (which must be prepped to work with ASR beforehand)
and the appropriate hard drive or partition to install onto. (For more
information, see my earlier article on ASR.)

Although these deployment methods are often easy to work with and are fairly
efficient, they still require you to physically "touch" each
workstation. In the case of NetInstall, this process can be as easy as
restarting and holding the N key down to initiate NetBoot (provided that the
NetInstall set you are using is the default NetBoot volume). With ASR, the
process is more cumbersome in that you need to provide an external boot volume
and manually run ASR.

By combining two of its management commands, Apple Remote Desktop
dramatically simplifies the process for NetInstall or for users of
Mike Bombich’s NetRestore
(a very nice GUI for ASR that now supports ASR’s extremely efficient
multicast functionality). Those two commands are Set Startup Disk and Restart.
Set Startup Disk allows you to change the startup disk for the computer to a
NetInstall set. As long as the selected NetInstall set is configured to not
require user interaction, once restarted, the selected computers will go through
the NetInstall (or NetRestore) process automatically. And because these commands
can be issued to any number of selected computers, you can start the process
with just a few clicks of your mouse from the Remote Desktop administrator
computer without ever leaving your desk.

After the install is complete (you’ll have to monitor the NetBoot
process of the Mac OS X Server to gauge this), you can re-add the selected
computers to Remote Desktop if needed. You might also need to rename the
computers, which can be done in bulk using the Rename Computer command. When
used for multiple computers, each computer is renamed with the selected name,
followed by a number (MacLab1, MacLab2, and so on). This process allows you to
verify that the process succeeded and to shut down the computers or perform
further configuration.